Lego[a] (/ˈlɛɡoʊ/[2]) is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of colourful interlocking plastic bricks and an accompanying array of gears, minifigures and various other parts. Lego bricks can be assembled and connected in many ways, to construct such objects as vehicles, buildings, and even working robots. Anything constructed can then be taken apart again, and the pieces used to make other objects.

Lego began manufacturing interlocking toy bricks in 1949. Since then a global Lego subculture has developed, supporting movies, games, competitions, and six themed amusement parks. As of 2013, around 560 billion Lego parts had been produced.[3] In February 2015, Lego replaced Ferrari as the "World's most powerful brand."[4]

History

The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (born 7 April 1891), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932.[5] In 1934, his company came to be called "Lego", from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play well". It expanded to producing plastic toys in 1947.[5] In 1949 Lego began producing, among other new products, an early version of the now famous interlocking bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks". These bricks were based in part on the Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which were patented in the United Kingdom in 1939[6] and then there released in 1947. Lego modified the design of the Kiddicraft brick after examining a sample given to it by the British supplier of an injection-molding machine that the company had purchased.[7] The bricks, originally manufactured from cellulose acetate,[7] were a development of traditional stackable wooden blocks that locked together by several round studs on top and a hollow rectangular bottom. The blocks snapped together, but not so tightly that they required extraordinary effort to be separated.

The Lego Group's motto is det bedste er ikke for godt which means roughly "only the best is the best" (more literally "the best is never too good").[5] This motto was created by Ole Kirk to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly.[5] The motto is still used within the company today. By 1951 plastic toys accounted for half of the Lego Company’s output, although Danish trade magazine Legetøjs-Tidende ("Toy-Times"), visiting the Lego factory in Billund in the early 1950s, felt that plastic would never be able to replace traditional wooden toys. Although a common sentiment, Lego toys seem to have become a significant exception to the dislike of plastic in children's toys, due in part to the high standards set by Ole Kirk.[8]

By 1954, Christiansen's son, Godtfred, had become the junior managing director of the Lego Group. It was his conversation with an overseas buyer that led to the idea of a toy system. Godtfred saw the immense potential in Lego bricks to become a system for creative play, but the bricks still had some problems from a technical standpoint: their locking ability was limited and they were not versatile. In 1958, the modern brick design was developed, and it took another five years to find the right material for it, ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) polymer.[7] The modern Lego brick was patented on 28 January 1958.[9]

The Lego Group's Duplo product line, introduced in 1969, is a range of simple blocks which measure twice the width, height and depth of standard Lego blocks, and are aimed at younger children.

In 1978, Lego produced the first minifigures, which have since become a staple in most sets. New elements are often released along with new sets. There are also Lego sets designed to appeal to young girls such as the Belville and Clikits lines which consist of small interlocking parts that are meant to encourage creativity and arts and crafts, much like regular Lego bricks. Belville and Clikit pieces can interlock with regular Lego bricks as decorative elements.

Lego Fabuland ran from 1979 to 1989. The more advanced Lego Technic was launched in 1977. Lego Primo is a line of blocks by the Lego Group for young children that ran between 2004 and 2006. In 1995 Lego Baby was launched for babies.

In May 2013, the largest model ever created was displayed in New York, made of over 5 million bricks; a 1:1 scale model of an X-Wing.[12] Other records are a 112-foot tower[13] and a 4 km railway.[14][15][16]

In February 2015, Lego replaced Ferrari as the "World's most powerful brand."[4][17]

The Lego range has expanded to encompass accessory motors, gears, lights, sensors, and cameras designed to be used with Lego components. Motors, battery packs, lights and switches are sold under the name Power Functions. The Technic line utilises newer types of interlocking connections that are still compatible with the older brick type connections. The Technic line can often be motorised with Power Functions.

Bionicle is a line of toys by the Lego Group that was marketed towards those in the 7- to 16-year-old age range. The line was launched in January 2001 in Europe and June–July 2001 in the United States. The Bionicle idea originated from the earlier toy lines Slizers (also known as Throwbots) and the short-lived RoboRiders. Both of these lines had similar throwing disks and characters based on classical elements. The sets in the Bionicle line have increased in size and flexibility through the years. Bionicle was discontinued and was replaced with Hero Factory in 2010, which itself was discontinued in favor of reviving the Bionicle line for 2015. Along with Hero Factory, another similar set has been made such as the Bionicle type Lego Legends of Chima, which uses the same structure for the minifigures.

One of the largest Lego sets ever commercially produced is a minifig-scaled edition of the Star WarsMillennium Falcon. Designed by Jens Kronvold Fredericksen, it was released in 2007 and has 5,195 pieces. It was surpassed, though, by a 5,922-piece Taj Mahal.[18]

Design

Lego pieces of all varieties constitute a universal system. Despite variation in the design and purpose of individual pieces over the years, each remains compatible in some way with existing pieces. Lego bricks from 1958 still interlock with those made in the current time, and Lego sets for young children are compatible with those made for teenagers. Six pieces of 2x4 bricks can be combined in 915,103,765 ways.[19]

Each Lego piece must be manufactured to an exacting degree of precision. When two pieces are engaged they must fit firmly, yet be easily disassembled. The machines that make Lego bricks have tolerances as small as 10 micrometres.[20]

Primary concept and development work takes place at the Billund headquarters, where the company employs approximately 120 designers. The company also has smaller design offices in the UK, Spain, Germany, and Japan, which are tasked with developing products aimed specifically at these markets. The average development period for a new product is around twelve months, in three stages. The first stage is to identify market trends and developments, including contact by the designers directly with the market; some are stationed in toy shops close to holiday periods, while others interview children. The second stage is the design and development of the product based upon the results of the first stage. As of September 2008 the design teams use 3D modelling software to generate CAD drawings from initial design sketches. The designs are then prototyped using an in-house stereolithography machine. These are presented to the entire project team for comment and for testing by parents and children during the "validation" process. Designs may then be altered in accordance with the results from the focus groups. Virtual models of completed Lego products are built concurrently with the writing of the user instructions. Completed CAD models are also used in the wider organisation, such as for marketing and packaging.[23]

Manufacture

Since 1963, Lego pieces have been manufactured from a strong, resilient plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS).[27] As of September 2008, the engineers use the NXCAD/CAM/CAEPLM software suite to model the elements. The software allows the parts to be optimised by way of mould flow and stress analysis. Prototype moulds are sometimes built before the design is committed to mass production. The ABS plastic is heated to 232 °C (450 °F) until at a dough-like consistency. It is then injected into the moulds at pressures between 25 and 150 tons, and takes approximately 15 seconds to cool. The moulds are permitted a tolerance of up to two micrometres, to ensure the bricks remain connected.[23] Human inspectors check the output of the moulds, to eliminate significant variations in colour or thickness. According to the Lego Group, about eighteen bricks out of every million fail to meet the standard required.[28] Lego factories recycle all but about 1 percent of their plastic waste from the manufacturing process. If the plastic cannot be re-used in Lego bricks, it is processed and sold on to industries that can make use of it.[29][30]

Manufacturing of Lego bricks occurs at a number of locations around the world. Moulding is done in Billund, Denmark; Nyíregyháza, Hungary; and Monterrey, Mexico. Brick decorations and packaging is done at plants in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico and Kladno in the Czech Republic. The Lego Group estimates that in the course of five decades it has produced some 400 billion Lego blocks.[31] Annual production of Lego bricks averages approximately 36 billion per year, or about 1140 elements per second. If all the Lego bricks ever produced were to be divided equally among a world population of six billion, each person would have 62 Lego bricks.[32] According to an article in BusinessWeek in 2006, Lego could be considered the world's No. 1 tire manufacturer; the factory produces about 306 million small rubber tires a year.[33] The claim was reiterated in 2012.[34]

In December 2012, the BBC's More or Less programme asked the Open University's engineering department to determine "how many Lego bricks, stacked one on top of the other, it would take to destroy the bottom brick?"[35] Using a hydraulic testing machine, the engineering department determined the average maximum force a 2×2 Lego brick can stand is 4,240 newtons; since an average 2×2 Lego brick has a mass of 1.152 grams (0.0406 oz), according to their calculations it would take a stack of 375,000 bricks to cause the bottom brick to collapse, which represents a stack 3,591 metres (11,781 ft) in height.[35]

Private tests have shown several thousand assembly-disassembly cycles before wear-out,[36] although Lego test for fewer cycles.[37]

Although some of the licensed themes, such as Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones, have had highly successful sales, Lego has expressed a desire to rely more upon their own characters and classic themes, and less upon licensed themes related to movie releases.[38] Several of the themes have been discontinued.

Robotics sets

Lego initiated a robotics line of toys called 'Mindstorms' in 1999, and has continued to expand and update this range ever since. The roots of the product originate from a programmable brick developed at the MIT Media Lab, and the name is taken from a paper by Seymour Papert, a computer scientist and educator who developed the educational theory of constructionism, and whose research was at times funded by the Lego Group.

The programmable Lego brick which is at the heart of these robotics sets has undergone several updates and redesigns, with the latest being called the 'EV3' brick, being sold under the brand name of Lego Mindstorms EV3. The set includes sensors that detect touch, light, sound and ultrasonic waves, with several others being sold separately, including an RFID reader.

The intelligent brick can be programmed using official software available for Windows and Mac computers, and is downloaded onto the brick via Bluetooth or a USB cable. There are also several unofficial programs and compatible programming languages that have been made to work with the brick, and many books have been written to support this community.

There are several robotics competitions which use the Lego robotics sets. The earliest is Botball, a national U.S. middle- and high-school competition stemming from the MIT 6.270 Lego robotics tournament. Other Lego robotics competitions include Junior FIRST LEGO League (Jr.FLL) for students ages 6–9, FIRST Lego League (FLL) for students ages 9–16 (age 9–14 in the United States, Canada, and Mexico), and FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) for high school students. Jr.FLL FLL, and FTC offer real-world engineering challenges to participants. FLL uses Lego-based robots to complete tasks. Jr.FLL participants build models out of Lego elements. FTC uses the NXT Intelligent brick and its pieces along with another building platform called TETRIX. In its 2010 season, there were 16,070 FLL teams in over 55 countries. In its 2010 season, there were 2,147 Jr.FLL teams with 12,882 total student participants in the United States and Canada.[39] The international RoboCup Juniorfootball competition involves extensive use of Lego Mindstorms equipment which is often pushed to its extreme limits.

Clones of Lego

The definitive shape of the Lego bricks, with the inner tubes, was patented by the Lego Group in 1958.[9][40] Several competitors have attempted to take advantage of Lego's popularity by producing blocks of similar dimensions, and advertising them as being compatible with Lego bricks.

In 2002, Lego sued the CoCo Toy Company in Beijing for copyright infringement over its "Coko bricks" product. CoCo was ordered to cease manufacture of the products, publish a formal apology and pay damages.[41]

Lego Digital Designer is an official piece of Lego software for Mac OS X and Windows which allows users to build with Lego bricks on their computers. Users can then publish their creations online on the Lego Design by Me website, or purchase the physical bricks to build them. Lego Digital Designer includes some Lego products which only exist online, including models for the children's television programs TUGS, Thomas and Friends and Speed Racer. There is also a game after the Lego Movie.

Official website

First launched in 1996, the Lego website has developed over the years, and provides many extra services beyond a shop and product catalogue. There are moderated message boards, founded in 2001. Since then the message boards had a complete overhaul in 2012, and the design was made neat,and contained many tools, and various improvements on design features from 2001.

Before My Lego Network, there was Lego Club Pages, which essentially held the same purpose, although the design lacked complex interaction,all you could do was add friends, it was also pretty basic in what you could do, so the company developed the improvement on Lego Club Pages and called it My Lego Network.

My Lego Network is a social networking site that involves items, blueprints, ranks, badges which are earned for completing certain tasks, trading and trophies called masterpieces which allow users to progress to go to the next rank. The website has a built in inbox which allows users to send prewritten messages to one another. The Lego Network includes automated non-player characters within called "Networkers", who are able to do things which normal users cannot do, such as sending custom messages, and selling masterpieces and blueprints. The site also has modules which are set up on the user's page to 'grow' certain things,[clarification needed] for showing picture compositions or both. The site includes instructions booklets for all Lego sets dating back to 2002.

Business consultancy

Since around 2000, the Lego Group has been promoting "Lego Serious Play", a form of business consultancy fostering creative thinking, in which team members build metaphors of their organizational identities and experiences using Lego bricks. Participants work through imaginary scenarios using visual three-dimensional Lego constructions, imaginatively exploring possibilities in a serious form of play.

Retail stores

A Lego store in Canada

Lego operates 90 retail stores (68 in the United States, 13 in the United Kingdom, 9 in Germany, 6 in Canada, 2 in France, 1 in Austria, 1 in Belgium, and 1 in Denmark[48]). There are also ones at the Downtown Disney shopping complexes at Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resorts as well as in Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. On 24 November 2010, a Lego retail store was opened in Lima, Peru,[49] at Jockey Plaza Shopping Center.[50] The opening of each store is celebrated with weekend-long event in which a Master Model Builder creates, with the help of volunteers—most of whom are children—a larger-than-life Lego statue, which is then displayed at the new store for several weeks.[51] In September 2014, Lego retail store opened in Zagreb, Croatia, being first of its kind in Southeastern Europe.[52][53]

Children's clothes

Since 1993 LEGOwear Clothes have been produced and marketed by a Danish company called Kabooki under license from Lego Group. The clothes are for boys and girls from 0–12 years old and the partnership also ties in with other Lego products such as 'Ninjago', 'Hero Factory' and the new 'Friends' theme for girls.

Board games

Lego Games launched in 2009–2010, and is a series of Lego-themed board games designed by Cephas Howard and Reiner Knizia[54][55] in which the players usually build the playing board out of Lego bricks and then play with Lego-style players. Examples of the games include "Minotaurus", in which players roll dice to move characters within a brick-build labyrinth, "Creationary", in which players must build something which appears on a card, or "Ramses Pyramid", in which players collect gems and climb up a customizable pyramid. Like many board games, the games use dice. However, in Lego Games, the dice are Lego, with Lego squares with symbols on Lego studs on the dice. The games vary from simple to complex, some are similar to "traditional" board games, while others are completely different.

Films and television

For a time, Lego turned down approaches from Hollywood to make a feature-length film based on the toy.[citation needed] However, a number of straight-to-DVD computer animated Bionicle and Hero Factory movies were produced, and Lego: The Adventures of Clutch Powers was released on DVD in February 2010, a computer-animated film made by Tinseltown Toons.[56]

Books and magazines

Lego has an ongoing deal with publisher Dorling Kindersley (DK), who are producing a series of illustrated hardback books looking at different aspects of the construction toy. The first was "The Ultimate Lego Book", published in 1999. More recently, in 2009, the same publisher produced The LEGO Book, which was sold within a slipcase along with Standing Small: A celebration of 30 years of the LEGO minifigure, a smaller book focused on the minifigure; in 2012 a revised edition was published. Also in 2009, DK also published books on Lego Star Wars (Lego Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary) and a range of Lego-based sticker books.

Although no longer being published in the United States by Scholastic, books covering events in the BIONICLE storyline are written by Greg Farshtey. They are still being published in Europe by AMEET. BIONICLE comics, also written by Farshtey, are compiled into graphic novels and were released by Papercutz.[64] This series ended in 2009, after nine years.

There is also the Lego Club and Brickmaster magazine, the latter discontinued in 2011.

In popular culture

Lego's popularity is demonstrated by its wide representation and usage in many forms of cultural works, including books, films and art work. It has even been used in the classroom as a teaching tool.[65] In the USA, Lego Education North America is a joint venture between Pitsco, Inc. and the educational division of the Lego Group.[66]

References

^Alexander, Bryan (23 October 2013). "'The Lego Movie' hopes to cement a built-in fan base". USA Today. Retrieved 24 October 2013. Given that iconic Danish toy company Lego has made 560 billion parts since 1958, there were a lot of characters to choose from when sketching out the script starring the plastic bricks.

^ abAlexander, Ruth (3 December 2012). "How tall can a Lego tower get?". BBC News. Retrieved 4 December 2012. The average maximum force the bricks can stand is 4,240N. That's equivalent to a mass of 432kg (950lbs). If you divide that by the mass of a single brick, which is 1.152g, then you get the grand total of bricks a single piece of Lego could support: 375,000. So, 375,000 bricks towering 3.5km (2.17 miles) high is what it would take to break a Lego brick.